Usually making chocolate mousse involves folding whisked egg whites into a chocolatey custard type mix and if I’m honest, it’s not something I do very often.

When you can get a chocolate dessert that looks as good as the one above, why would you bother?

Quark is one of those ingredients you hear about but can rarely find in the supermarket.

You think you’re going to find it amongst the cream or yogurt but it tends to be sold alongside the cheese. Previously I’ve only seen plain varieties so I was interested to hear that the Lake District Dairy Company had brought out some quarks under their own label with vanilla or lemon flavours too.

It comes in 300g tubs and keeps in the fridge for a similar length of time to buttermilk. You can use it in a similar manner to fromage frais but it has a creamier texture. Quark is naturally fat free which is surprising since it looks the same colour as full fat cream. It’s far less rich though!

Having been sent a couple of tubs to try out I was awash with serving suggestion ideas and have not yet even begun to cook with it.

This quark chocolate mousse couldn’t be easier, simply fold cooled molten chocolate into it until evenly coloured. I made this batch up with 50/50 ratio but it was surprisingly dense so I reckon you could get away with 30/70 chocolate to quark for a lighter results.

It’s that easy. There are no eggs, no added sugar. Nothing else.

Well okay you could ring the changes with some orange zest or maybe some cinnamon. But it’s really very easy, mix molten chocolate and quark together. This is what you get.

This is one of four recipes I’m publishing this week using Quark, a naturally fat free dairy product. Come back and see the others over the next few days!

Lemon quark “cheesecake” with speculoos

Rhubarb quark crumble

Fat free quark raspberry mess.

With thanks to Lake District Dairy Co for quark samples.

The post Egg free quark chocolate mousse recipe appeared first on Maison Cupcake | How to bake your way through life.

When you’re up close getting your hands dirty with social media all day long, you take it for granted people know about wonderful stuff already.

I was chatting to an offline friend last week and she had never heard of Pinterest.

“Oh it’s wonderful!” I told her. “You’d love it!”

You “pin” (click with mouse) your favourite pictures to “boards” (virtually) and other people can look at them (on t’internet).

I have been using Pinterest sporadically for around 12 months but have made more of an effort with it in the past 2 months or so. Definitely the more you use it, the more you get out of it.

I manage most of my Pinterest activity on the iOS apps for iPhone and iPad. Whenever I have a few moments doing nothing I pin a few pics rather than diving on Twitter. It’s become my favourite activity at the hairdressers, waiting for Chinese takeaways or tube trains.

I create new Pinterest boards whenever I spot a particular trend and I’ll collect pictures of different examples of it: for instance I have boards of ombre cakes, ruffled cakes, cakes with things hidden inside them. That kind of thing.

Then the people at Pinterest asked me if I’d like to share my favourite board with new UK Pinterest registrants and I knew just which one to pick straight away: Lovely Things in Jars.

My Lovely Things in Jars board is anything behind glass that you can eat. There are desserts, jellies, cheesecakes, verrines and even some preserves, chutneys and pestos. If it’s lovely and it’s in a jar and I want to remember it, that’s where I post it.

If you’d like to join me pinning some of the lovely things you see around the web – whether they’re in jars or not – then sign up for Pinterest HERE

The post Pinning and pining for Lovely Things in Jars appeared first on Maison Cupcake | How to bake your way through life.

The weather may keep kidding us it isn’t spring yet but I’m full of the joys of it with these ladybirds and bumble bees chocolate cookies.

I was especially pleased with how these came out because my husband actually asked if he could take them in to his colleagues at work. The feedback was that an office full of graphic designers all loved them and declared them to be “very graphic”!

My other reason for being particularly pleased with these little bug cookies was that they’re made with the simplest of sugarcrafting kit – all you need is two round cutters (one slightly bigger than the other – crinkled edges not essential), some pre-coloured sugar paste in primary shades such as the Dr Oetker kits sold in the supermarket and one disposable piping bag. The less faff with specialist stuff the better I say.

I was inspired to create these after hearing that the National AIDS Trust were holding a baking competition with a Birds and Bees theme to encourage people to talk about safe sex and HIV. To enter, all you need to do is email or post a picture on their Facebook or Twitter page before the deadline on May 25th.

The competition will be judged by My Cupcake Club Magazine and the National AIDS Trust chief executive. The winning entry could end up being published in My Cupcake Magazine.

The National AIDS Trust has run their Bake Aware campaign for the past couple of years. I have blogged about it previously with my glittery Dorothy red ribbon cookies for World AIDS Day.

• For step by step pictures and instructions how to make these cute cookies check out my latest post for BabyCentre: Easy to make ladybird and bee chocolate cookies
• My ever reliable chocolate cookie dough recipe to use as the bases is here on Maison Cupcake.

There are so many baking fundraising initiatives these days. Which ones have you taken part in?

The post (Lady)Birds and Bees cookies for National AIDS Trust Bake Aware campaign appeared first on Maison Cupcake | How to bake your way through life.

Like most mums I find my kid is hankering after a snack to plug the gap between school finishing and tea being ready. Generally this involves biscuits or bananas but until now not crisps or baked wholegrain corn snack thingies.

I was however asked to try out a bag of brand new Walkers Hoops and Crosses and share what I thought of them.

The unique selling points of Walkers’ Hoops and Crosses are that:

• They’re baked not fried so lower in fat than most other types of crisps
• They’re only 85 calories per bag so I might nick them instead of eating my usual Walkers’ Sunbites
• They help kids eat more whole grains – each pack is 56% wholegrain
• They come in three flavours; salt and vinegar, prawn cocktail or roast beef.
• You can play a game with them…. (instructions below)

Not a unique selling point but my own reflections:

• They’re a bit like Monster Munch but less monstrous
• They’re good as an after school snack
• There are only 18g worth in the bag unlike the standard 25g in most other bagged snacks. I can’t decide whether this is a way of controlling kids’ calorie intake or selling us products at the same price with less product in them. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.
• If they’re 56% wholegrain and only weigh 18g I estimate they’re just over 9g wholegrain. What proportion of a child’s daily intake this is I’m not sure off hand but it’s safe to say you won’t be off the hook from getting them to much further wholegrain in other foods.
• You can only thread them on your fingers like Hula Hoops if you’re a five year old with tiny fingers (I was deprived of this pleasure).
• The stuffed monkey is wonderful and has been admitted to Ted’s elite stuffed animal posse known in our household generically as “Animals” (admission to this privileged group involves lots of cuddles, being carried around the house in pyjamas and thrown up in the air whilst shouting “ANIMALS” in an excited voice).

But on with the serious business of the Hoops and Crosses tournament:

First tip out the baked wholegrain corn snacks on to the table. Divide them into hoops and crosses. A quick glance indicated that the hoops person can eat a few without disadvantaging themselves.

Then draw a noughts (or hoops) and crosses grid on a sheet of paper. Find someone to play against, in Ted’s case this was the adorable cute monkey who arrived in the box with the crisps – sorry – baked wholegrain corn snacks.

Third, resist temptation to do Johnny Vegas impressions saying “Monkeh” then you’re ready to go.

Ted goes first. He is crosses and Monkey is hoops.

Hmm Ted could have won this but he’s given Monkey the advantage.

Gah! Monkey could have won but missed the opportunity. I think Ted is just filling the board so he gets more snacks if he wins.

This is incredible! Ted should easily have won that but he’s left the field wide open for Monkey to romp home as the winner.

Oh darn it, the monkey has won!

But since Monkeys can’t eat bagged snacks, Ted gets to eat them anyway so it all ends happily – until mummy nicks the next lot to eat with her lunch.

Would I buy them again? Yes if they were on offer. I’m fickle like that…

Post sponsored by Walkers, all words and opinions my own.

The post Monkeying around with crisps, oops I mean baked wholegrain corn snacks appeared first on Maison Cupcake | How to bake your way through life.

Maybe I’ve got this coffee thing all wrong. I’ve made no secret of my horror of hot brown drinks on this site, my tea drinking family spent a great deal of energy into getting me to enjoy tea. My earliest memories of coffee are adverts with Joanna Lumley throwing it into plant pots to avoid drinking it. (Sadly I can’t find the clip on YouTube but here is the 1990s version.) My family were not coffee drinkers – even if they were obsessed with tea – and Starbucks didn’t exist so coffee was never on my radar as a desirable drink.

To this day, I very rarely drink tea or coffee. My one exception would be if I wanted to use a loo in Italy and for the price of an espresso you can justify sitting in a bar for two minutes before using the facilities without filling yourself up with so much liquid it’s time to go again 45 minutes later.  There’s barely more than an eggcup full and even I can force that quantity down in the manner of administering medicine.

Yet I do enjoy coffee flavoured things a great deal. The coffee fondant choccy left in the tub of Roses that no one else wants I’ll joyfully polish off.

So I got to thinking. Maybe it’s the milk. I don’t like milk. Ever since those hideous warm third pint bottles with skinny green straws we were bullied into drinking at school. Thank God Margaret Thatcher got rid of the stuff I say.

But I still couldn’t escape the dreaded milk on cereal. Separating into swirls. Perish the thought, turning brown and making my Coco Pops soggy.

Then I discovered that actually it wasn’t that I hated milk, I hated full fat milk. I can cope with semi skimmed and happily drink fully skimmed.

Today I will drink tea. But only if it’s served without milk and only if it’s a spicy lapsang souchong.

I used to think I didn’t like opera. I’d been twice and been bored to tears.

Then it occurred to me that maybe I just didn’t like German opera but that Italian opera would be better. I often enjoyed short snatches of opera I heard on telly so how come I couldn’t cope with a live performance of the stuff?

I bought myself some fairly low brow Lesley Garratt / Sarah Brightman opera greatest hits type CD and to my surprise I discovered that in fact I DID like opera, I just didn’t like Mozart.

Both times I’d seen opera it had been Mozart. So there you have it. I do like opera, I just don’t like Mozart.

Once I thought I didn’t like beer.

The weird thing was that those little beer bottle sweets you got in the pick and mix I really loved. So it wasn’t the taste of beer I didn’t like.

Then I discovered it was the temperature, I didn’t like warm beer. Cold lagers I discovered I liked. Chilled fruit beers even better!

But pints in glasses with handles with froth on top that old men drank on Coronation Street: no way.

So what I’m trying to explain in a round about way is why the hell does someone who doesn’t drink coffee agree to blog about a coffee machine?

Well I live in hope that like tea, like milk, like opera and like beer that some day I will discover exactly how I do like my coffee.

And what better way than the folks from De Longhi sending me this handsome beast to try out? If I like the machine I’m more likely to like the drink right?

There are some more hurdles before I qualify as a barista. I suffer from a type of coffee machine induced narcolepsy. Whenever I’m faced with one I glaze over as if someone especially dull is talking to me about pension plans.

My complete ineptitude at making tea and coffee is again due to my upbringing. After all, if you’re not drinking the stuff you don’t want to be fetching and carrying it for other people. My family soon gave up asking me to make cups of tea for them since I didn’t drink it I just couldn’t grasp how to make it properly. When I worked as a secretary I found it very convenient indeed to absolve myself from being demoted to always fetching the drinks on the basis that if I didn’t drink it myself, any tea or coffee I produced must surely be guaranteed to taste vile. I happily cultivated a perception of my making the tea or coffee being more threat than favour.

Yet I love the smell of coffee, I enjoy watching people in aprons and black shirts make it in cafes. When I lived on Muswell Hill Broadway in the mid 90s, there was an independent coffee shop called W Martyn. The smell of freshly ground coffee beans as you walked past the door was intoxicating. A different animal altogether to the caked brick of Nescafe sat in my cupboard since five years earlier.

On my journey to discover what kind of coffee I do like, I need to learn to use the machine. Initially I picked up the coma inducing badly laid out instruction leaflet and stood confused. There aren’t many buttons and plenty of other people make coffee so why am I mystified by the process? I understand how our silver hexagonal hob based coffee maker works and even I could fathom that this machine worked on the same principal.

My husband had already filled the back with water, I was armed with Illy powder and a plastic scoop. Then fortunately I came across the short cut instructions on glossy card: “6 Easy Steps to Making your First Espresso” which were much easier to understand.

Next I had to phone my husband at work. “I’ve got the Illy powder in the scoopy thing so now what??”

There’s a handle that sticks out the front like on the big machines you see in coffee bars – the baristas always give these a satisfying pull as if they’re compressing every last bit of flavour out of coffee grounds so I was a bit disappointed not to do that movement here, the arm stays rigid.

Once the arm was in position, I felt a bit silly needing to phone my husband as you basically press the “on” button then the button underneath with the coffee cup/liquid. Then you press that one again to stop.

I found most of our mugs were too tall to easily place under the nozzle – which was not a problem with either the Tassimo or the Lavazza models I’ve featured before. Nor would it matter if you used proper coffee cups for cappucino or espresso.

We do have two odd espresso mugs (prop shopping finds!) but they’ve got dark chocolate mousse in them at the moment so I couldn’t use those.

But eventually, mug manoeuvred in position (these gorgeous cute mugs were a present from Italy no less) I pressed two little buttons in the right order and MANAGED TO MAKE A CUP OF COFFEE.

It was easy, I didn’t burn anything. It wasn’t noisy. I managed to press the right button to stop it before I overfilled the mug.

It actually looks like coffee. Damn fine coffee to quote the man from Twin Peaks (or was it damn fine cherry pie?). I was surprised it had proper foam on it because I thought you only got that with coffee with milk in it. I’m not going to drink it yet though, I have other plans for it and I promise these don’t involve plant pots.

Meanwhile, whilst my coffee cools down here are my initial thoughts on the machine:

• For under £200, I’d say this is the best looking coffee machine that you’re going to find. The styling is beautiful, it’s not just retro, it’s the colours that make it stand out.
• Taking a look at various De Longhi Icona coffee machines in John Lewis, I noted that three models all at different prices were effectively the same machine. Same size, same shape, same specification – just finished in different materials. The silver model and black model are both cheaper than the pale blue or pale green ones (the silver one significantly so).
• The blue and green ones with coffee coloured trimmings look the most sophisticated. I hanker after the matching toaster and kettle which would sit very nicely in place of the green Morphy models you see on my Facebook cover photo.
• I pleased we didn’t need to buy special pods. There are two attachments for pods or powder. That said, once you’ve bought pods it would be more convenient and quicker to use and clean.
• I’m not sure which brand of pods I ought to buy. Do they do De Longhi ones?
• Supposedly the tray on the top is for warming cups although equally filling them with hot water will warm them too.
• The nozzles drip a lot so the drip tray (heh it’s not called that for nothing) gets full of cold coffee. Yuk.
• There’s a steam arm on the side and I’m dying to have a go with this. Apparently a metal third pint jug is best and by chance I have one of these already.

So today my espresso is ending up in cookie icing – you get a really subtle coffee colour and I think I will use this method in future when I want a pale brown icing.  You can read my directions how to make my chocolate coffee sugar cookies below.

But my quest to find a way to drink coffee that I enjoy continues. Here are the types of coffee that I can eliminate that I know I already do not like:

• Cheap
• With milk (although the jury is out on skimmed milk)
• Hot (hot drinks bore me. They’re not ready straight away then you forget about them until they’re tepid)
• With “mud” left in the bottom. (My in-laws drink Turkish coffee with sloppy grounds sludging in the bottom. I cannot cope with this).
• That stuff that’s been digested by civets and comes out as poo coated beans. I think we can ditch that too.

So probably this reduces things down to my trying a good quality coffee bean that I grind myself at home; make strong espresso from it, get rid of any froth on the top and make iced coffee with it. Probably I’ll need sugar or sweetener too.

When I’ve done this I’ll let you know but in the meantime here are the biscuits!

Finally, if you’ve been taunted by this luscious looking dark chocolate mousse then you’ll just have to wait for a forthcoming post where I shall tell you how to make it!

With thanks to De Longhi for supplying this beautiful machine. 

The post Chocolate coffee sugar cookies and why I’ll never be a barista appeared first on Maison Cupcake | How to bake your way through life.

I lapsed out of my habit of posting a French themed picture each Friday but here is one for you today.

I am continuing work on my new French travel site – it has its own Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and WordPress site built but I want to get some “pillar content” as Darren Rowse calls it before I launch properly. After all, you wouldn’t open a shop that didn’t have anything to buy in it. And before you ask where it is, only a privileged sprinkling of people have been told the name so far!

And this is where you can help out – if you would like to write any guest posts about France do get in touch. I will be looking for travelogues and insider info from all over France but especially I’m hoping some of you will be able to fill in gaps about places I’ve not been to yet. You will need to supply pictures with any posts you submit.

I’ll also be interested in publishing any reflections on French life and little things that are different there to the UK.

Something I’ve noticed when buying food in France is that the cuts of meat sold seem unfamiliar with what we see on sale over here. Not just in small butchers’ shops but supermarkets too. Our meat in the UK tends to be much more “dealt with”, neatly trimmed into individual portions ready to cook immediately. I get the impression that the French are much more confident in handling cuts of meat than we are. This can be a problem when stocking the fridge on a self catering holiday, I don’t want to spend hours roasting something that leaves me with days of left overs.

One thing I regular do see though is spit roasted chickens. Sometimes at markets there’ll be a wall of thirty of them twirling round (smelling amazing!). Alas, the time of day is rarely convenient as a holiday maker that I’m probably dining out for lunch and not within fridge distance of our accommodation.

Every French market has a stall selling saucisson however the range of sausages available is far narrower than in the UK. Supermarkets regularly sell rabbits and a broader selection of offal. You see fewer burgers for sale (I am generally barbecuing on holiday!) but those that you see are pricier but better quality. You see pre-packed chicken breasts in French supermarkets but are less likely to see packs of legs and wings. I was speaking with my Italian friends at the weekend who told me chicken wings are tricky to buy in Italy as there’s no market for them. Possibly in France it’s the same?

Not meat related but I see a similar thing going on with sales of fish and seafood in French supermarkets. A tank full of lobster is a common sight. Can you imagine such a thing in Sainsbury’s?! 99.9% of Brits wouldn’t have a clue what to do with a lobster!

The butchers above is in the main square of St Remy de Provence.

What have your experiences been of buying and cooking meat in France?

The post France on Fridays #5: A Quick Trip to La Boucherie appeared first on Maison Cupcake | How to bake your way through life.

I’ve been saving up a few bits and pieces to tell you about and rather than drip feed them here goes with a mighty bumper Bitesize Bits news round up of stuff I’ve been doing elsewhere off and online.

The inspirational Crumbs Food sisters have started a dead popular YouTube channel and they asked me to drop into Lucy’s kitchen and film a couple of videos with trouble free tips for decorating cakes.

You can watch my two appearances in How to use Buttercream and Cupcake Masterclass – Chocolate Decorations.

Why not subscribe to their entertaining Crumbs Food YouTube video channel whilst you’re there?

Great British Chefs recently named me as one of their top five UK baking blogs – along with some very fine company.

I have also started to write for Great British Chefs and you can see my posts published so far here and there are two more to come soon.

On January 1st this year I finally published my “Shrink Mummy Shake” and more recently it’s had a bit of a bonanza on Pinterest becoming one of my most popular posts ever – it even reached the dizzy popularity of 3000 hits in one day. Just look how many times it’s been pinned here: http://pinterest.com/source/maisoncupcake.com/

I also received a tub of Food Thoughts Cocoa which I have been utilising in my regular Shrink Mummy Shakes and I am pleased to say it gives a far better colour and flavour than supermarket own brand cocoa or even Bournville.

Whether it’s better than Green & Black’s the jury is still out.

Speaking of Pinterest, I have been having fun finally getting to grips with everyone’s favourite picture pinning site lately.

When I’m not pinning seriously Covetable Cakes and collecting pictures of baking trends such as ombre cakes, hidden surprise cakes and ruffle cakes, I’m encouraging my fellow pinners to pin their favourite seasonal strawberry recipes.

I’ve always been fond of strawberries and it struck me that although Pinterest boards get set up for seasonal stuff like Easter and Christmas that boards celebrating specific seasonal foods were less common. You watch – everyone will do it now but you saw it here first.

Are you on Pinterest? Come look for me at http://pinterest.com/maisoncupcake

Last year I contributed to this book Get Rich Blogging by Zoe Griffin. There’s a big chunk of an interview with me in the chapter Tips for Food and Drink Bloggers. It’s been published word for word how I emailed it to the author. I wasn’t familiar with the other food bloggers interviewed although I knew Mari’s World and A Mother’s Ramblings in the parent blog chapter.

Whether you can get rich blogging is a moot point. Certainly people do make money, more often people get perks that off set their expenditure.

I think this book is written in quite a tabloid-y way and I didn’t think all the “tips” in the food chapter were very well researched. For instance it describes “Martha’s Circle” as a networking organisation for food bloggers when actually it’s a highly elite advertising network that 99.9% of us can only dream of being worthy of joining.

If you’re completely new to blogging you could learn some stuff from Get Rich Blogging but frankly I think you’re better off spending your money on a copy of Pro-Blogger: Blogging Your Way to a Six Figure Income and taking the bit about the six figure income with a very large pinch of salt.

When my book Bake Me I’m Yours Sweet Bitesize Bakes came out last year I had various bits of magazine coverage with extracted recipes.

So I was delighted to be asked to contribute some recipes direct from this blog to Cupcake Heaven magazine. My Bailey’s Cupcakes were featured in their spring issue which is available in iPad and foreign language editions.

I also found a new home for the aforementioned Bailey’s Cupcakes as a new cover photo for the Maison Cupcake Facebook Page.

If you’ve not yet “Liked” the Maison Cupcake Facebook page then now is your prompt to do so. Instead of letting it sit quietly I have been posting tit bits daily and it’s often the place to find stuff out before I blog about it!

This year’s World Baking Day takes place on 19th May with the theme of “Bake Brave”. Supposedly everyone around the world will be pushing their baking boundaries and step out of their comfort zones attempting something they’ve not baked before.

Ever the sceptic, I say why not join Daring Bakers and do it every month? Quite what the point is about World Baking Day, other than to promote Stork margarine, I’m not really sure. Will you be baking brave??

Finally, do you remember when I agonised back in January whether to invest in a subscription to 30 Best Loved Recipes book collection?

I took the plunge and subscribed. But what happened next? They DIDN’T DELIVER ANYTHING. Twice my money was debited and nothing turned up. Disgruntled I unsubscribed and got a refund. This is by no means happening to all of their subscribers but I’d be interested to know below if you too have had problems.

That’s all for the May Bitesize Bits round up. If you have any questions pop them below!

The post May Bitesize Bits News Round Up appeared first on Maison Cupcake | How to bake your way through life.

With the dearth of posts lately you’ve probably noticed I’ve had bloggers’ block. Before rumours start circulating that I’m either pregnant or head down writing another book I should let you know what the real reason is.

I should fess up outright that I haven’t baked anything for months since I’ve been on a cake and biscuit de-tox.

I’m still being interested in chatting about baking but my kitchen has been largely a cake free zone for a while. As I’ve said previously, I don’t see the point in documenting weight loss and exercise programmes until you’ve lost a significant amount and kept it off for a significant time.

In the meantime therefore, I will be writing about baking and dessert related news without putting myself under any obligation to fill my kitchen with sugary temptation on such a frequent basis.

So there you have it, for a while I’m going to be a baking blogger who doesn’t bake. I came to a decision that I didn’t want baking to be the sole focus of my life although it would remain the dominant focus of this blog.

You may already have seen my mini spin off site Dinner With Crayons which is where I’m gradually moving the non-baking food content, restaurant reviews and family content, I have also been working behind the scenes on a new French travel site too. I will keep you posted when this goes live and hope the Francophiles amongst you will follow.

Meanwhile, enjoy my latest book reviews and I hope you will be inspired to try some of them out whilst I’m eating salad and working out at the gym!

PS before anyone starts yet more sniping about book reviews by people who haven’t cooked anything in them, consider that easily three quarters of cookery books purchased are used as armchair reading and NEVER have anything cooked from them. Clearly a lot of people get pleasure from cookery books on this basis. So there!

The Clandestine Cake Club Cookbook

Taking inspiration from the underground restaurant/supperclub movement, Lynn Hill’s brainchild Clandestine Cake Club has grown from a secretive local get together to a nationwide baking movement. This home-spun community baking network has tapped into our credit crunching zeitgeist triggering much TV and media coverage.

The eponymous Clandestine Cake Club Cookbook brings together contributions from a full geographic spread of over 30 CCC members. With bookshop shelves heaving with new baking titles, you’d not think a book simply about cake would work but it does. The absence of cupcakes, brownies and muffins pushes slice-able cake creativity with every flavour, texture and structure centre stage.

Around three quarters of the cakes are illustrated and any of them would be worthy of a National Trust cafe counter. By no means is this a book just for your granny, but she’d definitely like it. The Clandestine Cake Club Cookbook edited by Lynn Hill (Quercus).

Bake Me I’m Yours… Push Pops

From the same series as my own book comes Bake Me I’m Yours… Push Pops. For the cupcake phobic, push pops are probably the devil incarnate. A push pop, incase you’re not familiar, is several cupcakes sandwiched into a clear tube on a stick. For food snobs they’re everything that’s wrong with cupcakes and cake pops merged into a plastic package.

Whilst gastronomically I’m inclined to sympathise, my sense of fun overrides and push pops offer a new realm of baking presentation combinations to play with. This little book features five mini cupcake sponge recipes, six buttercreams (each with variations) to mix and match into 40 push pop combos. Some push pops are simply decorated with sweets or fruit with two thirds of them topped with easily achievable themed sugarcraft designs.

Like other books in the Bake Me series, the projects represent a wide range of holidays and celebrations. You’ll need to invest in push pop containers before you start popping these confections out. Bake Me I’m Yours… Push Pops by Katie Deacon (FW Media).

Chocolate: 50 Easy Recipes

You may not have heard of Academie Barilla – they are an organisation who preserve and promote the traditional Italian cooking. Chocolate: 50 Easy Recipes pulls together the components of chocolate themed Italian desserts.

There’s no tiramisu – although that’s technically coffee – but plenty of puds Nigella has probably introduced you to already: semi freddo, zucotto, cannoli. Less familiar to me were torta caprese (chocolate and almond tart), cremini (fried, similar to doughnuts) and bonet (rum and caramel cheesecakey slice). The presentation is, as you’d expect, cheffy and the recipes traditional rather than outlandish.

That said, this small volume with its quirky bite taken out of the corner of each page is chock full of crowd pleasing chocolate cakes and desserts you’ll find hard to resist. The cover photo above doesn’t do it justice.

Plus it’s a bargain £5.99 on Amazon right now. Chocolate: 50 Easy Recipes by Academia Barilla (White Star Publishers).

Cake Decorating With The Kids

Cake Decorating with the Kids is full of basic sugarcraft projects grouped by theme which even if your kids aren’t skilled enough to achieve, they’ll certainly be attracted to. Easter chicks, ladybirds, flowers and even a teddy bear’s picnic.

Some projects are definitely a join effort between adults and kids such as the stacked cakes but probably an enthusiastic nine year old under supervision would manage most things in this book. It’s not just big cakes, there are cupcakes, cookies and cake pops too.

Step by step pictures throughout and a nice big A4 soft back format, this is definitely a book I’d have poured over begging grown ups to make stuff from. Would make a great gift for pre-teens who are into baking and cake decorating. Cake Decorating with the Kids by Jill Collins and Natalie Saville.

Sweet Designs

Dessert tables are a hot import from the US and Amy Atlas is one of the doyennes of the trend. Sweet Designs offers 14 themed baking displays for parties, weddings or baby showers with templates and styling ideas to match. Fantastically inspirational, Sweet Designs feels like a paper version of Pinterest in your lap.

There are sections on labelling your table items, making bags and candy wrappers and a full list of stockists for props used in each table layout – the only sad thing for UK readers is that these are all from the US and difficult to obtain over here. Beyond being a book full of desserts and recipes, this volume has a dizzy parade of ideas for your next home celebration.

This book would be idea for anyone wanting to cater for their own parties in style or planning a home-crafted wedding on a budget. My copy is an American import so none of the ingredients or craft supplies lists are in metric but apart from this it’s all very easy to follow and beautifully laid out. A highly recommended aspirational read even if you doubt you’ll make any of it yourself. Sweet Designs by Amy Atlas (Hyperion).

The Great British Farmhouse Cookbook

Yeo Valley are nowadays best known for their yogurt however their Holt Farm base in Somerset produces a range of organic dairy products as I discovered in my visit there last year. Sarah Mayor, daughter of Yeo founders Roger and Mary Mead grew up on the farm with its British Friesan herd and later a tearoom. The Great British Farmhouse Cookbook is her collection of recipes showcasing the dairy products in Yeo’s repertoire alongside fresh produce grown at Holt Farm.

Generously they encourage readers to make their own yogurt, cheeses and butter (as opposed to buying Yeo’s) so there is a sense if you tend your vegetables you can buy into the Yeo way of life through this book. Jamie Oliver is a fan and the matt pages and graphics inside the book are highly reminiscent of Jamie Magazine. Dishes I’m most tempted to try include a savoury cauliflower, caramelised red onion and Caerphilly cake made from polenta, blackberry and brown sugar fingers and Sumatran lamb curry.

The chapters are organised according to where key produce came from; the pasture, the fruit orchard, the veg garden, the farm yard, the woods, hedgerows, fields and streams. I can see their logic in this but it makes the dishes on the pages seem to be in a higgledy piggledy order i.e. fishcakes with a lemon butter and chive sauce in “the dairy” chapter are immediately followed by jellies and puddings. The “farmhouse kitchen” chapter mostly devoted to baking precedes the chapter around meat. The recipe list at the rear breaks things down into a more comprehensible run through that would have made more sense.

It’s a lovely looking book, but if the two copies I’ve received are representative, it’s let down by poor quality binding. It’s tightly glued instead of stitched meaning you can’t apply light pressure to the spine to encourage a certain page to stay open – it springs shut with a noisy glue stretching crack instead. Which for for a book from a reputable publisher like Quadrille is surprising. A delightful book but check you’re happy with the binding of your copy in real life bookshop rather than risking a creaky copy from Amazon. The Great British Farmhouse Cookbook by Sarah Mayor (Quadrille).

With thanks to FW Media, Clandestine Cake Club and Yeo Valley for review copies. Amy Atlas was my Christmas pressie from my mum!

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For twelve months I’ve been on the verge of setting up a French travel site and I may possibly even get the thing live soon.

That said, even if I was publishing stuff on my new site, probably the contents of this weekend’s Calais shopping splurge in Carrefour would be more at home here anyway.

I have hankered after a proper look around the Cite Europe complex at Calais for a couple of years. Whenever I’ve been past, I’ve been short of time or cruelly taunted by French Sunday trading hours.

To make things worse, I’ve even stayed in hotels just across the road but not been able to convince my husband to delay our journey south in order for me to get my shopping fix.

So this weekend I was determined to put this right. We went across via Eurotunnel for three days and two nights and I dedicated our first morning to shopping in Calais. I should save a better description of what’s on offer there for the phantom French site however I thought readers here would be more interested in the contents of my shopping basket.

Carrefour at Calais has a fantastic selection of cookery books – one of the best I’ve seen in a French hypermarket. This was the biggest selection of books I’d seen other than in proper city bookshops. (Some French supermarkets stock cookery books, occasionally a lot but frequently only a few.)

I added to my collection of “Les 30 Recettes Culte” with these three volumes on yogurt, feta cheese and TWIX.

“Mignardise Sucrees” roughly translated is sweet bitesize bakes i.e. the same name as my own book Sweet Bitesize Bakes so I couldn’t resist picking this up.

I didn’t pick up many groceries since we were not self catering and I already have a guilty hoard of French jars in my kitchen.

Some items I thought worth selecting were:

• Packet macaron mix – I was intrigued to see how these came out.
• Sucre chouquettes – you see these on top of brioche but never for sale in the UK.
• Violet syrup – difficult to buy in the UK and expensive. This bottle was a bargain at £3.
• Blackcurrant coulis – I opted for blackcurrant since I can easily make raspberry coulis myself whereas blackcurrants are trickier to get hold of.
• Teisseiere strawberry syrup – Although this is one of my favourite summer French drinks to order in bars, I don’t tend to drink it at home. My husband snook this into the trolley.

Funnily enough, although I’ve kept banging on about the French website, I actually started one of sorts before Maison Cupcake. And one of it’s only posts was about canned potato gratin. On that occasion it was from Lidl in the UK although sadly Lidl only stock it occasionally for French promotions rather than all the year round.

So whenever I get opportunity I stock up on several cans of it in French supermarkets.

It’s pre-cooked thin slices of potato in a garlicky creamy sauce and you simply bung it in an oven dish and bake for 25 minutes.

If you’re coming back from France by car, do buy some. The cans are always 850g so rather heavy if you’re flying!

I also bought a wad of beige check tea towels. I have an irrational affection for French tea towels…

Finally I grabbed some white crockery in various shapes. These items are all Carrefour’s own label range and similar prices to supermarket own brand crockery in the UK. I think you’ll agree they look more sophisticated though!

The pots in the middle look like egg cups but they’re actually cylinders for desserts. I can’t wait to get photographing some creations in these.

These items were by another brand called “Quid”. I especially like the rectangular plates since they’re shallow and won’t create shadows around food in photos.

Finally I should ‘fess up that this wasn’t the end of it.

On leaving France, we spent two days in Belgium where I discovered Bruges’ answer to Divertimenti, Dille & Kamille. It was THE best kitchen shop I’d ever been in in my entire life. My husband patiently sat outside for nearly an hour!

I can’t show you what’s in the bag yet because I haven’t unwrapped it all. I think the lady must have thought I was crazy only buying one of everything.

What do you like to buy in French supermarkets?

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Tortillas usually fall apart when I make them but pleasingly these beef tortilla wraps served in thick rings seem to stay intact. Tortilla wraps travel well and I have given them to my husband to take to work for his packed lunch.

This beef tortilla wraps recipe has started something of a wrap obsession in my house, they were so tasty I made them three times in a fortnight so they are worth sharing.

If you cannot find the Baxter’s chutney then any sweet chutney or onion marmalade would do. I thought the wraps cut into rings would look attractive in a party buffet.

Finally, if you think this beef tortilla wraps recipe looks familiar, I originally blogged them back in 2010 although they were lost in one long rambling post stuffed with three recipes and I decided they should be enjoyed on their own!

Are you chomping at the bit to go on a picnic?

With thanks to Baxter’s for supplying samples of chutney and beetroot.

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